Operating System (starring Linux)

Introduction:

Every desktop computer uses an operating system. The most popular operating systems in use today are:

• Windows
• Mac OS
• UNIX

Linux is an operating system -- very much like UNIX -- that has become very popular over the last several years.

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Info on speech recognition

INTRODUCTION:

Today, when we call most large companies, a person doesn't usually answer the phone. Instead, an automated voice recording answers and instructs you to press buttons to move through option menus. Many companies have moved beyond requiring you to press buttons, though. Often you can just speak certain words (again, as instructed by a recording) to get what you need. The system that makes this possible is a type of speech recognition program -- an automated phone system.

You an also use speech recognition software in homes and businesses. A range of software products allows users to dictate to their computer and have their words converted to text in a word processing or e-mail document. You can access function commands, such as opening files and accessing menus, with voice instructions. Some programs are for specific business settings, such as medical or legal transcription.

People with disabilities that prevent them from typing have also adopted speech-recognition systems. If a user has lost the use of his hands, or for visually impaired users when it is not possible or convenient to use a Braille keyboard, the systems allow personal expression through dictation as well as control of many computer tasks. Some programs save users' speech data after every session, allowing people with progressive speech deterioriation to continue to dictate to their computers.

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About Adobe an Macromedia Flash

What is FLASH

Adobe Flash (previously called Macromedia Flash) is a multimedia platform originally acquired by Macromedia and currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications.

A simple flash document

Flash can manipulate vector and raster graphics and supports bi-directional streaming of audio and video. It contains a scripting language called ActionScript. Several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash content, including Adobe Flash Player, which is available for most common web browsers, some mobile phones and other electronic devices (using Flash Lite). The Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program is used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform, such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices.

Files in the SWF format, traditionally called "ShockWave Flash" movies, "Flash movies" or "Flash games", usually have a '.swf ' file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash movie (with the .exe extension in Microsoft Windows). Flash Video (FLV) files have a .flv file extension and are either used from within .swf files or played through a flv aware player, such as VLC, or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added.

History Of FLASH

The program Flash was the Brainchild of Jonathan Gay, who developed the idea while in college and extended it while working for Silicon Beach Software and its successors.

In January 1993, Jonathan Gay, Charlie Jackson, and Michelle Welsh started a small software company called FutureWave Software and created their first product, SmartSketch. A drawing application for pen computers running the PenPoint OS, SmartSketch was designed to make creating computer graphics as simple as drawing on paper. When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. As the Internet began to thrive, however, FutureWave began to realize the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might easily challenge Macromedia's Shockwave technology. In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and re-released it as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC. By that time, the company had added a second programmer Robert Tatsumi, artist Adam Grofcsik, and PR specialist Ralph Mittman. Tatsumi focused on writing the authoring tool's user interface, while Gay wrote the graphics renderer, curve and shape math code and the browser plug-in. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early work with the Internet (MSN). In December 1996, Macromedia acquired the vector-based animation software and later released it as Flash, contracting "Future" and "Splash" of the FutureWave name.


Versions of Flash Released in past:

1.) FutureSplash Animator (April 10, 1996): initial version of Flash with basic editing tools and a timeline

2.) Macromedia Flash 1 (November 1996): a Macromedia re-branded version of the FutureSplash Animator

3.) Macromedia Flash 2 (June 1997): Released with Flash Player 2, new features included: the object library

4.) Flash 3 (May 31, 1998): Released with Flash Player 3, new features included: the movieclip element, JavaScript plug-in integration, transparency and an external stand alone player

5.) Macromedia Flash 4 (June 15, 1999): Released with Flash Player 4, new features included: internal variables, an input field, advanced ActionScript, and streaming MP3

6.) Macromedia Flash 5 (August 24, 2000): Released with Flash Player 5, new features included: ActionScript 1.0 (based on ECMAScript, making it very similar to JavaScript in syntax), XML support, Smartclips (the precursor to components in Flash), HTML text formatting added for dynamic text

7.) Flash MX (ver 6) (March 15, 2002): Released with Flash Player 6, new features included: a video codec (Sorenson Spark), Unicode, v1 UI Components, compression, ActionScript vector drawing API

8.) Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (ver 7) (September 9, 2003): Released with Flash Player 7, new features included: Actionscript 2.0 (which enabled an object-oriented programming model for Flash)(although it lacked the Script assist function of other versions, meaning Actionscript could only be typed out manually), behaviors, extensibility layer (JSAPI), alias text support, timeline effects

9.)Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 (ver 7) (September 9, 2003): Released with Flash Player 7, new features included all Flash MX 2004 features plus: Screens (forms for non-linear state-based development and slides for organizing content in a linear slide format like PowerPoint), web services integration, video import wizard, Media Playback components (which encapsulate a complete MP3 and/or FLV player in a component that may be placed in an SWF), Data components (DataSet, XMLConnector, WebServicesConnector, XUpdateResolver, etc) and data binding APIs, the Project Panel, v2 UI components, and Transition class libraries.

10.) Macromedia Flash 8:

1.)Macromedia Flash Basic 8 (released on September 13, 2005): A less feature-rich version of the Flash authoring tool targeted at new users who only want to do basic drawing, animation and interactivity. Released with Flash Player 8, this version of the product has limited support for video and advanced graphical and animation effects.
2.) Macromedia Flash Professional 8 (released on September 13, 2005): Released with the Flash Player 8, Flash Professional 8 added features focused on expressiveness, quality, video, and mobile authoring. New features included Filters and blend modes, easing control for animation, enhanced stroke properties (caps and joins), object-based drawing mode, run-time bitmap caching, FlashType advanced anti-aliasing for text, On2 VP6 advanced video codec, support for alpha transparency in video, a stand-alone encoder and advanced video importer, cue point support in FLV files, an advanced video playback component, and an interactive mobile device emulator.

11.) Flash CS3 Professional (as version 9, released on April 16, 2007): Flash CS3 is the first version of Flash released under the Adobe name. CS3 features full support for ActionScript 3.0, allows things to be converted into ActionScript, adds better integration with other Adobe products such as Adobe Photoshop, and also provides better Vector drawing behavior, becoming more like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fireworks.

12.) Adobe Flash CS4 Professional (as version 10, released on October 15, 2008): Contains inverse kinematics (bones), basic 3D object manipulation, object-based animation, an enhanced text engine, and further expansions to ActionScript 3.0.

Recent developments

Adobe Labs (previously Macromedia Labs) is a source for news and pre-release versions of emerging products and technologies from Adobe. Most innovations, such as Flash 9, Flex 3, and ActionScript 3.0 have all been discussed and/or trialled on the site. One area Adobe is focusing on (as of February 2009) is the deployment Rich InternetApplications (RIAs). To this end, they released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a cross-platform runtime environment which can be used to build, using Adobe Flash, rich Internet applications that can be deployed as a desktop application. It recently surpassed 100 million installations worldwide. Two additional components designed for large scale implementation have been proposed by Adobe for future releases of Flash. First the option to require an ad to be played in full before the main video piece is played. Secondly, Adobe has announced plans to add Digital Rights Management (DRM) capabilities into the new version of Flash. This way Adobe can give companies the option to link an advertisement with content and make sure that both are played and that they not be changed. The current status of these two projects is unclear. [dated info] Flash Player for smartphones is expected to be available to handset manufacturers at the end of 2009.

Format and plug-in

Compared to other plug-ins such as Java, Acrobat Reader, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player, the Flash Player has a small install size, quick download time, and fast initialization time. However, care must be taken to detect and embed the Flash Player in (X)HTML in a W3C compliant way.
In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, support for video, MP3-based audio, and bitmap graphics.

As of Flash Player 8, it offers two video codecs:

On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time support for JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF. In the next version, Flash is slated to use a just-in-time compiler for the ActionScript engine.

Use of computer resources

1.) It is argued that the performance of Adobe Flash Player on different platforms may not be optimal.
2.) Any flash player has to be able to animate on top of the video rendering, which makes hardware accelerated video rendering at least not as straightforward as with a purpose built multimedia player.[41] It is not uncommon for other multimedia players to play fine where Flash Player drops frames and skips audio.

Many popular web browsers now have extensions that prevent immediate Flash playback, but lets the user play it by clicking it first. Firefox has NoScript and Flashblock while a separate extension for Opera called Flashblock is available. One similar extension for Internet Explorer is Foxie, and contains a number of features, one of which is also named Flashblock. K-Meleon has a built-in Flash blocker.

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About file compression

Introduction:

If you download many programs and files off the Internet, you've probably encountered ZIP files before. This compression system is a very handy invention, especially for Web users, because it lets you reduce the overall number of bits and bytes in a file so it can be transmitted faster over slower Internet connections, or take up less space on a disk. Once you download the file, your computer uses a program such as WinZip or Stuffit to expand the file back to its original size. If everything works correctly, the expanded file is identical to the original file before it was compressed.


How is it possible?

Most types of computer files are fairly redundant -- they have the same information listed over and over again. File-compression programs simply get rid of the redundancy. Instead of listing a piece of information over and over again, a file-compression program lists that information once and then refers back to it whenever it appears in the original program.

As an example, let's look at a type of information we're all familiar with: words.

In John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address, he delivered this famous line:

"Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

The quote has 17 words, made up of 61 letters, 16 spaces, one dash and one period. If each letter, space or punctuation mark takes up one unit of memory, we get a total file size of 79 units. To get the file size down, we need to look for redundancies.

Immediately, we notice that:

• "ask" appears two times
• "what" appears two times
• "your" appears two times
• "country" appears two times
• "can" appears two times
• "do" appears two times
• "for" appears two times
• "you" appears two times

Ignoring the difference between capital and lower-case letters, roughly half of the phrase is redundant. Nine words -- ask, not, what, your, country, can, do, for, you -- give us almost everything we need for the entire quote. To construct the second half of the phrase, we just point to the words in the first half and fill in the spaces and punctuation.


Redundancy and Algorithms

Most compression programs use a variation of the LZ adaptive dictionary-based algorithm to shrink files. "LZ" refers to Lempel and Ziv, the algorithm's creators, and "dictionary" refers to the method of cataloging pieces of data.

The system for arranging dictionaries varies, but it could be as simple as a numbered list. When we go through Kennedy's famous words, we pick out the words that are repeated and put them into the numbered index. Then, we simply write the number instead of writing out the whole word.

So, if this is our dictionary:

ask what your country can do for you

Our sentence now reads:

"1 not 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 -- 1 2 8 5 6 7 3 4"

If you knew the system, you could easily reconstruct the original phrase using only this dictionary and number pattern. This is what the expansion program on your computer does when it expands a downloaded file. You might also have encountered compressed files that open themselves up. To create this sort of file, the programmer includes a simple expansion program with the compressed file. It automatically reconstructs the original file once it's downloaded.

But how much space have we actually saved with this system? "1 not 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 -- 1 2 8 5 6 7 3 4" is certainly shorter than "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country;" but keep in mind that we need to save the dictionary itself along with the file.

In an actual compression scheme, figuring out the various file requirements would be fairly complicated; but for our purposes, let's go back to the idea that every character and every space takes up one unit of memory. We already saw that the full phrase takes up 79 units. Our compressed sentence (including spaces) takes up 37 units, and the dictionary (words and numbers) also takes up 37 units. This gives us a file size of 74, so we haven't reduced the file size by very much.

But this is only one sentence! You can imagine that if the compression program worked through the rest of Kennedy's speech, it would find these words and others repeated many more times.


Searching for patterns:

In our previous example, we picked out all the repeated words and put those in a dictionary. To us, this is the most obvious way to write a dictionary. But a compression program sees it quite differently: It doesn't have any concept of separate words -- it only looks for patterns. And in order to reduce the file size as much as possible, it carefully selects which patterns to include in the dictionary.

If we approach the phrase from this perspective, we end up with a completely different dictionary.

If the compression program scanned Kennedy's phrase, the first redundancy it would come across would be only a couple of letters long. In "ask not what your," there is a repeated pattern of the letter "t" followed by a space -- in "not" and "what." If the compression program wrote this to the dictionary, it could write a "1" every time a "t" were followed by a space. But in this short phrase, this pattern doesn't occur enough to make it a worthwhile entry, so the program would eventually overwrite it.

The next thing the program might notice is "ou," which appears in both "your" and "country." If this were a longer document, writing this pattern to the dictionary could save a lot of space -- "ou" is a fairly common combination in the English language. But as the compression program worked through this sentence, it would quickly discover a better choice for a dictionary entry: Not only is "ou" repeated, but the entire words "your" and "country" are both repeated, and they are actually repeated together, as the phrase "your country." In this case, the program would overwrite the dictionary entry for "ou" with the entry for "your country."

The phrase "can do for" is also repeated, one time followed by "your" and one time followed by "you," giving us a repeated pattern of "can do for you." This lets us write 15 characters (including spaces) with one number value, while "your country" only lets us write 13 characters (with spaces) with one number value, so the program would overwrite the "your country" entry as just "r country," and then write a separate entry for "can do for you." The program proceeds in this way, picking up all repeated bits of information and then calculating which patterns it should write to the dictionary. This ability to rewrite the dictionary is the "adaptive" part of LZ adaptive dictionary-based algorithm. The way a program actually does this is fairly complicated, as you can see by the discussions on Data-Compression.com.

No matter what specific method you use, this in-depth searching system lets you compress the file much more efficiently than you could by just picking out words. Using the patterns we picked out above, and adding "__" for spaces, we come up with this larger dictionary:

ask__ what__ you r__country __can__do__for__you

And this smaller sentence:

"1not__2345__--__12354"

The sentence now takes up 18 units of memory, and our dictionary takes up 41 units. So we've compressed the total file size from 79 units to 59 units! This is just one way of compressing the phrase, and not necessarily the most efficient one.



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